1. Field of the Invention
This disclosure relates to the field of systems and methods for the electronic tracking of valuable objects and information. Specifically, the disclosure relates to the physical and electronic collecting, tagging, organizing and tracking of evidence and other information related to police or other investigative work for later use in law enforcement, judicial proceedings or military operations.
2. Related Art
In the United States and many other justice systems, judges, juries, and others involved in the judicial system rely on evidence presented at a trial, mediation, arbitration, or other formal proceeding to make a determination as to guilt, innocence, liability, and other legal findings. Because of its importance to such proceedings, there has arisen an entire body of law devoted to nothing except a determination of what may be used as evidence, how it may be presented, and what may be inferred from it.
A good number of evidentiary rules exist to attempt to prevent the presentation of false evidence and to make sure that material shown and used at trial is the actual material that is involved in the underlying action. As the evidence is often the basis for a determination, if the underlying evidence is flawed, inaccurate, or presented inaccurately, a bad determination can be made. As should be clear, it is therefore necessary to make sure that rules are followed with regards to the chain of custody of evidence to make sure that what is presented at trial is ultimately the same as what was originally located.
Because of the nature of criminal investigations, it is very important to know that a piece of evidence located at a crime scene is the same piece of evidence tested by a forensics lab and is ultimately the same piece of evidence presented at trial. In a civil case, lapses in the ownership of physical evidence can often be eliminated by testimony. For example, an individual can be placed on a witness stand and requested to indicate whether or not a certain thing is theirs. In a criminal trial, however, such testimony may not be possible as a defendant is not required to take the stand, and may have an increased interest to lie or deceive. Further, in criminal situations, an increased burden of proof can often require a much more exacting standard. Still further, the same type of evidence may not be as important in a civil case. For example, it may be much more important that a rat was found in an apartment, than the same rat is presented at trial.
In a criminal action, there are often a couple of key pieces of physical evidence. For example, one such key piece of evidence may be the gun used in a shooting. However, the gun may not be immediately connectable to the shooting as the action of the shooting has separated the gun from the bullet which is the more direct connection. Even if the gun is located at the scene, the gun is rarely seen by investigators when the shooting is “occurring.” It is, therefore, necessary to connect a gun to the bullet, and to who pulled the trigger. This can involve not only the specifics of the gun itself, but where the gun was located (was it on the defendant, at the scene etc.), how it is known that it fired the bullet which hit the victim (e.g. from ballistics analysis), and how it is determined that this defendant pulled the trigger (e.g. from fingerprints, powder residues, etc.).
The specifics of these connections often mean that a gun has to pass through numerous hands after it is collected. Further, in some situations, there may be multiple guns located and it is important to know which one was actually the weapon used to commit this crime. For example, it will generally be necessary to show that a specific firearm was the same one found in a specific place. Further, it also may be necessary to connect that that specific firearm matches the type used in the shooting, that ballistics information for a bullet fired from that firearm matches the ballistics information from a bullet taken from the victim, and that the bullet tested is actually the bullet from the victim. Still further, it is necessary to connect that a fingerprint from the defendant was taken from that same firearm, that a bullet casing found at the scene was used by that firearm, and so on.
It should be apparent that the web of connections can grow very complicated very quickly. Further, this information is generally needed weeks or months after the shooting occurred and the gun was located. Should an incorrect connection be made somewhere in the process of getting from crime to trial, it is possible to introduce a whole slew of errors. Thus, there is a significant chance that if a mistake is made and an inaccurate connection is introduced, the entire web of connection can become flawed. If the gun taken from the scene is correctly identified as that which fired the bullet, but that gun was then inadvertently replaced with a different gun after the connection was made, a later fingerprint analysis of the “new” gun would point to the gun being used by an individual who actually has no connection with the shooting.
To try and deal with this, rigorous authentication methods have traditionally been used to make sure that evidence is gathered, stored, tested, and handled in such a way that the connections of later evidence to the original evidence are all maintained. This is commonly referred to as “chain of custody” and the idea is that definitive links through each person handling the evidence can be made which tend to show that the same piece of evidence made it through the entire evaluation process and no substitutions were made at any point. Further, if a problem is discovered, chain of custody also provides for improved likelihood of identifying where the problem occurred either to catch a purposeful tampering with evidence, to detect a faulty procedure, or even to potentially allow it to be rectified.
As should be apparent from the above, the purpose of chain of custody is to improve the chances that the same evidence is used by each of the multiple individuals that use it and assert that their results are from it. Should a bullet be inaccurately connected to the victim, it is possible that a piece of false evidence will inadvertently be used because that inaccuracy connects the wrong gun, and probably the wrong defendant to that victim. If the bullet from the shooting is mixed up with the bullet from the ballistics test of the confiscated firearm, the conclusion that the gun fired the bullet used becomes automatic as the bullets (which are actually the exact same bullet) clearly “match.” At the same time, it should be clear that the conclusion is inherently flawed (and potentially completely wrong) as the proposition became self-supporting that this was the gun used in the crime when indeed no such conclusion can be drawn with any accuracy due to the incorrect connection.
In its simplest form, chain of custody is the documentation of the movement and location of a piece of evidence from the time it is collected until it is finally presented in court. Chain of custody will generally involve a clear indication of the collection of the evidence, how it is stored, when the evidence is placed in different people's control, and how the evidence transfers between individual's control so as to identify any chance of it being tampered with, a mistake being made in its identification, or it is simply being lost.
One can best understand chain of custody by recognizing that a piece of evidence will change hands repeatedly, but the object is only a single thing. Therefore, if it is in a lab under one person's control it cannot simultaneously be elsewhere. Further, if that individual has a unique piece of evidence they will probably return that same piece of evidence. So long as the pathway of that piece of evidence can be tracked, and procedures are in place which inhibit it from getting inaccurately connected to anything else, the odds of a piece of evidence traveling through the system with accurate connections are dramatically increased.
As should be clear from the above, the chain of custody provides for a clearer indication that the same thing is always being referenced. Should the chain be broken, there is a possibility that later evidence is not correctly connected. Should this happen, evidence may be thrown out at trial or may be given reduced weight by a jury attempting to determine the quilt or innocence of the specific defendant. Still further, as a chain of custody indicates who has handled the evidence, should there become concern that evidence has been tampered with, it is possible to recreate who could have done the tampering.
Because of the problems in maintaining the chain of custody in evidence, a large number of materials have arisen to try and make sure that the chain of custody is maintained. In most instances, these materials involve highly manual practices and specialized collection containers to provide for written records of who has handled a piece of evidence. The materials also serve to contain the specific evidence within them so that the individual item is more easily kept tracked and is protected from contamination by an outside source. These systems generally provide ways to uniquely identify a piece of physical evidence. Such systems try and make sure that an individual piece of evidence can be easily and quickly identified as the unique and specific item it is. For the most part, such systems provide for containers into which evidence may be placed, labeling of containers, and identification of individuals who handled (e.g. opened) those containers.
While these systems generally work, they are manually intensive and are subject to concern as the containers can be misplaced, misrecorded, or misidentified through human error. For example, an evidence bag having a unique number allows for specific identification of the evidence bag (and its contents). However, it is possible that when an individual checks out a bag, an inaccurate identifier of the bag is entered by the human user creating a chain of custody concern. Similarly, the contents of the bag may be placed back in the wrong bag leading to inaccuracies.
Still further, while physical evidence is necessary in any investigation, crime scene photos, police officer notes, and other materials also associated with the case and necessary for investigation are not necessarily physical evidence. This information can itself become evidence depending on what occurs during the investigation. These items may have reduced chain of custody issues, but are often not connected at all with the case that they support and when they do become evidence may have increased concerns due to them having been handled differently.
Even with recent improvements in evidence management techniques and automation, such as tagging, organizing, searching and tracking physical evidence and related information, particularly including improvements in the collection of the physical evidence using barcodes and other machine readable codes, such as QR codes and RFID codes, there remains a significant lack of integration between the central repositories of information that are available in central computer systems and the mobile scanners that are used to collect and track evidence. For example, each one of the mobile scanners in U.S. Pat. No. 6,947,866, U.S. Pat. No. 6,816,075 and US Pub. No. 2010/0305992 can read various types of machine readable codes corresponding with physical evidence and upload the information to the central computer systems, and US Pub. No. 2010/0305992 even indicates that the mobile scanner can be used to enter data indicative of various pieces of evidence at the crime scene, store the data in the mobile scanner, and upload the data to the central computer system. However, the mobile scanners in these known systems do not allow the user to enter critical evidence about suspects, such as vital statistics, nor do they allow the user to perform searches on suspects' vital statistics nor do they allow for searching descriptions of evidence that is already associated with a suspect in the central database.
Even though the evidentiary master records that are stored in these known central computer systems contain information about suspects, victims, witnesses, and other people, and users of the host computer systems have been able to search the vital statistics of such people for decades, this searching functionality is not provided to the users of the mobile scanners. Instead, the mobile scanners are integrated into the host computer systems in these prior art systems primarily for the entry and tracking of physical evidence, but the mobile scanners are not used for entering vital statistic information about people or for searching the evidence records other than the searches using the machine readable codes. For example, the searching of the mobile scanner in US Pub. No. 2010/0305992 is limited to machine readable codes associated with particular evidence items which indicates that the searching capability of the mobile scanner appears to be for the purpose of tracking particular items of physical evidence using the corresponding codes that have been entered into the central repository rather than for any broad searching of the vital statistics or names of people or the descriptions of physical evidence. Instead, in these known systems, the broader searches are performed using the host computer.
This lack of broad searching capability for the mobile scanners in the prior art is indicative of evidence management systems that have been developed for forensic crime scene investigations without interviews with victims, witnesses and other persons of interest. Therefore, there remains a need for a mobile collection device which can perform the role of a mobile scanner for forensic investigations but which can also be used in a way that is needed by first responders to a crime scene or a location of some other emergency. For interpretive evidence, witnesses are interviewed and the investigator or other officer takes notes with pen and paper. The mobile scanners in the references do not provide the investigator with any way to take notes and link them with suspects, victims, witnesses or other persons of interest. The officer may enter some of the basic witness information, such as the witness' name, address and driver's license number into their mobile communication system in their patrol car, and possibly a suspect's name, and they will probably receive back some public record information, including criminal history and driving citations, from a centralized server computer that queries one or more databases. The officer may also call in a description of a suspect that a dispatcher may relay to other officers through their radios and mobile communication systems, but the mobile scanners do not provide the officer with a way to take pictures of suspects, link it with vital statistics and names and upload the information to a central server computer. Additionally, when an officer is interviewing victims and witnesses and time is most critical, the mobile scanners do not allow the officer to enter a suspect's name or vital statistics into their mobile scanner and send the search to the central computer.
In current systems, officers could call in the names and vital statistics of suspects on their radios and may even be able to go back to their vehicles to run searches and see any resulting pictures that may be found in the master record of evidence in the central server computer and other investigatory tools that are networked with the central server computer and the vehicle systems. However, the officers cannot perform these types of searches with their mobile scanners or any other handheld mobile collection device. Instead, the current devices that perform the various investigatory actions are fragmented and operate on systems that many times do not even communicate with each other. In the years following the 9/11 attacks, there were calls for integrating the investigatory tools that are being used by police offers, fire fighters, paramedics and emergency medical personnel, and other first responders. Some back end systems have become more integrated and there have been improvements in the mobile scanners for tracking evidence. However, before this invention, no other handheld computer device had provided first responders and the initial investigating officers with the ability to have a completely integrated mobile system that is in a networked communication with the master record of evidence in the central computer system as well as other investigatory tools.